Barbeque Ribs on the Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker – there are few things better! We cook ours on a 22.5 inch Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker with a heavy duty rib rack – it lets us cook 4 BBQ ribs on each level – we cook dry using All American Spice Rub.
This is the first in a series of blog posts on our adventures at the 2010 Memphis in May World Barbecue Championships. Over the course of 4 days we racked up 4 top 15 finishes (we even managed to place 4th in the World Championship’s beef catagory with our brisket) and several hours of amazing videos from some of the most interesting and influential folks in BBQ. We thought we’d kick off our series with a bang – our first entry into our 2010 Memphis in May scrapbook is an interview with TLC BBQ Pitmaster and down right nice guy Tuffy Stone of Cool Smoke and Q Barbeque fame.
Over the course of the past year we’ve had the chance to get to know some of the great legends of BBQ, including guys like Pat Burke and Mike Mills – the founders of the Legends of BBQ Club. Tuffy, a friend and fellow Virginian, is a guy who has made a name for himself and risen to “Legend” status in short order. Tuffy is pitmaster of the Cool Smoke competition BBQ team and owner of Q Barbeque (two locations in Midlothian, VA and Hampton, VA). If the name Tuffy Stone is ringing a bell in your head but you just can’t quite place where you’ve heard it before it is probably because you saw him on TLC’s hit show BBQ Pitmasters.
For a guy with celebrity status and the ability to make anything placed on a smoker taste like a five star meal you might think he’d be working in the distance and shadows of his Jambo Pit built by legendary smoker builder and artisan Jamie Geer (Tuffy’s pit looks more like a cherry red Corvette than a smoker – it performs more like one too!), but he isn’t. Tuffy is as approachable as they come and loves to talk BBQ with fellow competitors, customers and fans.
The best part of the Competition BBQ circuit isn’t the great barbecue found around every corner, it is the chance to meet and become friends with some of the best folk around – like Tuffy. BBQ teams from around the country compete in contests sanctioned by a number of barbecue societies including KCBS, MIM, and MBN. These teams use everything from Weber Grills to Jambo Pits to homemade smokers to compete for prizes and tropies in catagories like chicken, beef brisket, pork shoulder, pork ribs, and whole hog. If you love to grill find a contest near your home and sign up – you’ll have a blast and meet some great folks!
Now sit back and enjoy our interview with BBQ Pitmaster Tuffy Stone of Cool Smoke.
For more information on Pork Barrel BBQ and to follow our adventures at Memphis in May 2010 stay tuned to our blog and Twitter pages.
Want to build your own BBQ Smoker? Here’s a great post from popular mechanics on how to build your own backyard BBQ smoker – http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/how-to-plans/metalworking/3372796 I really liked their statement at the beginning of the post – you can cook good BBQ in anything – and that’s right – great BBQ is about taking the time, achieving a constant temperature, and having patience! This post is a great 11 part post on step by step plans for building your own BBQ backyard smoker – so enjoy!
Build Your Own Backyard Smoker
Real barbecue involves cooking tougher, fattier cuts of meat like pork butt and beef brisket over a duration of 4 to 6 hours or longer at temperatures near the boiling point of water. The payoff: tough meat becomes flavorful and succulent, fat is rendered out and the low, smoky fire leaves the aroma of smoke permeating the meat. A good cook can make good BBQ in anything. I decided after years of working with a small water smoker–and recently acquiring a vacation house–to build one of my own. This project involves a lot of welding, but several wire-feed welders are sold at The Home Depot and Sears, and you can learn to do simple welding with only an hour or two of practice. Salvaged materials will be fine for your smoker’s frame. You can use old water pipe, rebar or even electrical conduit.
Here Part II on our series of the most important BBQ tools:
Rib Rack – We love to cook ribs – they are easy to cook, and with a little bit of Pork Barrel BBQ’s All American Spice Rub – they are guaranteed to be a big success at the party. A major part of grilling or cooking is space management. We’ve talked about a lot of important tools on this blog – if you bbq a lot, epecially bbq ribs on your bbq smoker or grill – a rib rack is a key tool of the trade. Read more.
Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker – We have a number of events and BBQ competitions coming up this summer and needed to increase our capacity to cook a lot of great BBQ! What is really amazing about the Smokey Mountain Cooker (we got two of the 22.5 inch models) is that it can hold 12 slabs of ribs, 4-8 pork shoulders, 3-6 briskets, and even 4 turkeys! Read more. And even more here.
Check out this amazing modified Weber Grill Pizza Oven (known as the FrankenWeber or Franken Weber) created by Pizza Hacker – you can visit him at http://www.twitter.com/pizzahacker.
This crazy awesome Franken Weber 22 inch Weber grill reaches temperature of over 1000 degrees F and cooks some sweet pizza pie.
Also be sure to check out the great Franken Weber modified Weber grill video here:
